The new Apple iBooks Textbooks truly are a revolution in what kids will very probably be caring around with them in the next 5 or 10 years. The idea of cramming all those thick books into a single iPad is really great.

I only see one problem in the very near future. The file size of these new textbooks are way too big. How many books do your kids carry around with them per semester? 6? 7? I looked at the file sizes of these textbooks, and some are downright huge. One was 2.77GB’s!

Now, I suspect, that if schools buy iPads for their students, they are going to be getting the lowest end iPad’s they can. So, the 16GB WiFi model. That’s only 7 textbooks the size of the Pearson Biology textbook. To be fair, not all the text books are 2.77GB’s. Most seem to be about 1.25GB’s and a couple were under 1GB. Still, these are just the first few textbooks to come out. How crazy are the publishers going to get putting videos and other space consuming data into these textbooks?

It’s possible that this whole problem will be moot when the iPad 3 is released. Maybe Apple will get rid of the 16GB version and have a 32GB, 64GB and 128GB version, and the size of the textbooks won’t be a problem. Unless they get even bigger. Plus, there are still the college textbooks to consider. Surely, those books will be much larger than the K-12 textbooks.

Am I being silly here?